March 25, 2016 Lunch – Crab Imperial, avocado, and Swiss cheese Omelet, Gruet Spring Break Barrel Tasting and Tour, and Dinner – BBQ Shrimp and Chick Pea stew over rice.
Another full day of activity. Willy, Suzette and I worked for about two hours cleaning the driveway and side yards of weeds. Then at noon we made an omelet. I minced a medium shallot and a garlic plant and about seven stalks of chives from the garden. Willy then broke 5 eggs and I stirred them with Herbs de Provence salt a bit of water and two twists of the pepper mill. I sautéed the shallot and garlic in 2 T. of butter. Then I added the egg. After a few minutes when the egg began to firm up I added the avocado, the chives and Swiss Gruyere cheese and Suzette added some Crab Imperial. I cooked this combination of items for another five minutes until the bottom was firm. I the flipped about 1/3 on top of the other portion and cooked the whole some more until I thought the center was still soft but congealed. We toasted slices of Bosque Bakery baguette, which we served with fig preserves Suzette had made several years ago. Willy filled a tea ball with Tazo chai tea, which we drank and Suzette drank the last of the Prosecco from last night’s meal.
We took a nap after lunch and at 4:00 Suzette and I drove to Gruet Winery for its Spring Break Barrel tasting and Tour ($20.00). This is the first time we had done barrel tasting of champagne. As we learned during the tour guided by Laurent Gruet, the winemaker and an owner, methods champagne is a three year process, involving an initial fermentation, then an aging on yeast, then a second fermentation with sugar and more yeast, then extraction of the dead yeast, and finally corking and aging the wine some more. Prosecco takes only six months and skips the aging on yeast stage and simply goes from the initial fermentation to the final bottling with sugar and yeast.
When we arrived we were poured glasses of the newly fermented brut, then Chardonnay, which we liked very much for its light clean flavors, Then we went into a large room adjoining the tasting room to wait for the tour. At 5:00 Laurent poured us glasses of a new wine he is making this year, a rose’ Sauvage. Sauvage is a zero dosage champagne, which from what I can tell eliminates the third step of adding additional sugar and yeast after the initial fermentation and aging. It produces a more pronounced statement of the richness of the fruit in Gruet’s 100 % pinot noir rose’. Gruet also makes a 100% chardonnay Sauvage that again expresses the lightness of the unbaked chardonnay grapes.
I likes them both, but Suzette and Laurent liked the Rose’ Sauvage better. One must not get confused between the yet to be released Rose’ Sauvage and Gruet’s current rose champagne thar does have a second dosage of sugar and yeast at the end of the process.
The most interesting part of the tour was seeing the large racks filled with several hundred bottles each of capped bottles of champagne aging on the yeast which are turned periodically to move the dead yeast down the neck of the bottle toward the cap, where it can be removed by freezing the cap area and removing the frozen plug of dead yeast before the final dosage. There are large machines that do all of these processes now. Laurent says that Gruet typically bottles 1000 bottles per day which means there must be 100s of 1000s of bottles aging in the warehouse at any given time.
After the tour we returned to the tasting room and tasted the Blanc de noir and finally Gruet’s Pinot Noir from the barrel. Each were lighter in texture and complexity than the final wine. The Bland de noir, because it has yet to have its second dosage and the pinot noir because it had yet to fully bottle age.
Finally, Suzette asked Cora to pour three glasses, one of the rose from the barrel, a second of the rose’ Sauvage and a thirst of the current rose’. It was possible to taste the before, the barrel tasting rose against the near finished rose’ Sauvage and the finished rose. One could readily taste the differences between the yet to be aged base rose, the nearly finished Sauvage without a second dosage, and the finished rose’ that had had a second dosage. Very interesting. I liked the final rose’ that had had all of its aging and second dosage, while Suzette liked the rose’ Sauvage like Laurent, who during the Tour said, and I am paraphrasing, “If the champagne is properly made, the Sauvage will give the best indication of the richness of the fruit to one who has developed their palate to get beyond attraction to sweet wine.”
I guess Suzette and Laurent have more developed palates than mine.
We drove to Costco at 6:30 to buy eggs for a cloud cake Suzette will make for Amy and Vahl’s Easter Brunch. We also bought corn chips for guacamole and a bottle of Chateau Ahon Haut-Medoc ($12.99) and two bottles of 2013 Clos de Val Cabernet Sauvignon (a steal at $23.49), rated 95 points.
We drove home and I made a cup of rice and went to the garden, which Mario and his assistant were finishing today, and picked a handful of chard. I de stemmed the chard, cut the leaves into bite sized pieces and added them, with about ½ cup of water to the stewed chick peas.
The Paul Prudhomme Louisiana Kitchen recipe for BBQ shrimp was its usual delicious spicy, but the shrimp were not of the best quality, because they were mushy and collapsed a little bit, when shelled. We filled our pasta bowls with rice and added spoonfuls of chick pea stew to one side of the pile and BBQ shrimp to the other side.
We drank cold Coors beer with dinner and watched a lovely movie named “for Keeps” with Mollie Ringwald. I put dehydrated cherries into the PPI syrup we had cooked the fruit in for the stuffing, but I forgot to check it and the sugar burned and blackened into a sticky burned mess.
Alas, not everything succeeds. But, at least, it is instructive if one learns why it failed. I shall blame this failure on a wonderful afternoon of tasting champagne.
After dinner Suzette ate some ice cream, while finished my beer and we watched the movie.
Bon Appetit
No comments:
Post a Comment